Electron wrote:A friend of mine and I are making plans for a game, and have a slight disagreement about engines to use. I would prefer to use Irrlicht and he would prefer Quake2. I am hoping that the Irrlicht community will be happy to tell me why Irrlicht is better than the Quake2 engine.
I myself worked quite a lot with Quake2. And weeeell will see. Comparison follows.
Electron wrote:On the plus side for Q2 I can think of 3 things. It was made as a commercial engine, its well known, and it is a full game engine as opposed to only a 3d engine.
The main point is not the sperate parts which create the game, but HOW they work together. If you make your own game and want multiplayer, you have to decide what server/client game acrhitecture you want; you must build in security routines; etc etc. These aren't as easy as implementing a program, say Newton; because these things aren't schematic and need your creativity and wit most times.
Electron wrote:However, it is easy enough to find engines for the other components besides 3d. Irrlicht has these advantages that I know of:
Let's discuss
I've cut it into pieces because it's easier to read this way.
Electron wrote:easy to use
Depends. I find Quake2 not a bit harder than Irrlicht to program - in fact, consider I'll have to write a new game with Irrlicht (which I possibly wont now) while just heavily alter an existing one with Quake2. Although starting from scratch would be easier with Irrlicht, that's doubtless.
Electron wrote:still in developement so more likely to keep up with technology
Might be personal, but I don't really like still in development things... there are issues which are promised to be addressed, improvements etc which is a good thing. But. You never know how will the final v1.0 look afterall, and how will the other engines look by that time. While it's a good thing to be able to keep up to other things, using Irrlicht sometimes gets annoying - I experienced quite a lot of slowdowns, for one...
Electron wrote:Q2 uses DX7 i think
I forgive you because you stated you never worked with Quake2. Quake2 uses OpenGL. It never ever used DX, but there was a half-ported version to DX8, called Quake2 v3.22 . HOWEVER, Quake2Vanilla (the original Quake2) and all the Quake2 MoDs use OpenGL.
Electron wrote:large user community all in one place (here) as opposed to Q2's scattered community
http://www.quakesrc.org
Electron wrote:I know it better than Q2
, works fine with MingW.
Well, I can't dispute the first
as for the 2nd - Quake2 runs on Windows and Linux. It might work on other systems as well, but I haven't really seen bothering themselves to make it work there or to test, so I don't know.
All in all, this thing really depends on what you want and stuff. Quake2 has really surprising MoDs - Quake2Evolved, Quake2MAX, QBism, etc. These games reach up to Quake3 in terms of graphics, and are very good in those terms - in fact, they are even faster than Irrlicht with the same settings on my PC. The thing they lack are the more advanced features - such as realtime shadows (which isn't too good in Irrlicht either atm though - 24FPS with 2 shadows and 54 without them? *gasp*) or OctTree management.
Physics and other plugins are nonexistant with Quake2 and Quake2MoDs, do I need to say.
Irrlicht has a HUGE advance here. But Quake2 does have tons of tutorials to start with - might sound unimportant but you can literally master the coding of Q2 wiht them!; and Quake2 is a working game which you can *cough* "just" modifiy.
Now, a bit clearer summary of mine:
--QUAKE2--
-------------
+working game, working code, finished product
+EXCELLENT mods, tutorials and stuff
+big fanbase
+fast engine
+easy convert to Quake3 stuffs
-obsolete technics (for one:linked network/rendering updates!!!!
)
-messy code
Carmack 0wnz but they didn't clean the code not even a bit if you ask me lol
-horrible physics, horrible collosion detection
-horrible light handling
-HORRIBLE!! security! I could compare it to Outlook. Thank God QuakeSrc addressed many of these stuffs.
--IRRLICHT--
---------------
+up to date, good features
+variety of formats supported
+easier to use for most people
+physics and other plugins which make it go more robust
-variety of formats supported and only .x working afterall
-bugs, speed issues
-need to write your own game on it
-lack of existing games working with it - no examples in work
CONCLUSION:
All in all, it's up to you. There are all sorts of engines out, and every of them has good and bad points. Pick your liking and go for it!
I think I'm gonna go for Ogre myself.
EDIT>>>>>
Oh, almost forgot. Don't write down old engines. Just look at this Quake1 engine:
http://tenebrae.sourceforge.net/index.p ... nshots.txt
Tenebrae1.x engine for Quake1. What can it do? Realtime lightning, perpixel lightning, bumpmapping and other such things. What's more important, it can cling to 100+ FPS while doing all this.